BIND 8 and BIND 4 compatibility ($ORIGIN)

[Kevin Darcy]

Todd Hobdey wrote:

> We've upgraded to Win2K in our corporate office and now use its DNS services
> as our primary.  Just for good measure, we also have a BIND 8 implementation
> running on AIX as a secondary.  Out at our retail stores, we're running BIND
> 4 on AIX getting their zone transfers from the BIND 8 machine at the office.
> We hadn't planned on upgrading the field servers because they aren't using
> Win2K in the field.  Everything was working fine until I brought up a couple
> of new Win2K domains.  They've created subdomain records and now the BIND 4
> machines can't get their zone transfers.  It would appear that the problem
> is that zones in 4 use a syntax like:
>
> _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.domain.com         yada,yada,yada
>
> where 8 uses:
>
> $ORIGIN _tcp.dc._msdcs.domain.com
> _kerberos           yada,yada,yada
>
> and the BIND 4 servers are choking on the $ORIGIN tag.  Is there a way
> around this incompatibility short of upgrading the field servers?

The $ORIGIN directive has been around since the master file format was defined
(RFC 1035, dated November 1987), so I doubt very much that the
$ORIGIN directive, _ipso_facto_, is causing BIND 4 to choke.

It's more likely that you're running a really ancient version of BIND 4 that
doesn't understand SRV records. Less likely, maybe the underscore is causing it
to choke.

It's time to upgrade. BIND 4 has been dead for years.


- Kevin